December 2015

As the year 2015 approaches its conclusion, ANTOINETTE FAWCETT explores a word which is highly appropriate for the season.

Backend, n. (also Back End, back end, and back-end)

I write this article at the end of a rather wet and blustery November, feeling that my chosen Word of the Month, ‘backend’, has a certain rightness about it that Nicholson must also have sensed when he used it in his deeply ecological and rather bleak poem ‘The Elm Decline’. It is a blunt-sounding word, plain and to the point, and, in the sense that Nicholson uses it in this poem, it is firmly associated with the northern counties of England. It means the latter part of the year, before the winter sets in.Much less romantic in feeling than the word ‘autumn’, with its associations of maturity and fruitful harvest, and much more expressive than the American English ‘fall’, which simply denotes the autumnal leaf-fall, ‘backend’ has been claimed as the Cumbrian word which perfectly fits the ‘lost’ fifth season, after autumn and before winter. Whitehaven-based journalist and blogger Alan Cleaver tells his readers in an entertaining little article that although there is some dispute about when exactly the season of Back End (as he writes it) actually is, most people would place it “around the first two weeks in December”. His definition continues like this:It’s that time when there are few leaves left on the trees, the days are at their shortest, and the weather at its darkest. Back End looks like it sounds: the dull, scraggy bits of the year. Although the Oxford English Dictionary does not highlight ‘back-end’ (as it writes it) as being a dialect word – perhaps it looks just too matter-of-fact and ordinary for the editors to have been aware of its regional associations – it does recognize that the word, in its second meaning, denotes the “later part or ‘latter end’ of a season; (absolutely) of the year: The late autumn, the ‘fall’”. The online Collins dictionary does identify the word, in its first definition, as being Northern English dialect, while many of the interesting dictionaries and glossaries of the philologists of the 19th century also recognize this word as being associated specifically with the Cumbrian vernacular. One of the entries I like best in this context is from A Glossary of the Words and Phrases of Furness which is as follows:Back-end–latter part of the year; e.g. “I’se gāèn tà leeàv mè spot (situation) this back-end.” The reason I like this particular quotation is that the example of usage gives us a lively snapshot not only of the language current around 1869 when the glossary, by J. P. Morris, was published, but also allows a glimpse into the customs of the time. The speaker is going to leave his (or her) job at the end of the agricultural year – in late October or early November – and will quite possibly look for another, better, situation at one of the many local Hiring Fairs held at Martinmas or thereabouts. Volume 1 of the extensive and scholarly English Dialect Dictionary, written by Joseph Wright and published in 1898, gives a much wider scope to the use of ‘backend’ in the sense being discussed, not only throughout all the northern English counties, but also in Scotland. Wright used many correspondents and readers to help him with the compilation of this dictionary, and quotes from their answers to his queries. We can see from these that the precise dating of the season of backend was in dispute and varied from one part of the country to another:Back-end lasts from harvest to Martinmas; the period following is called ‘efther Martlemas’ or ‘a bit afooar Kesmas’ (J.N.); Back-end is the only word in use for the period between harvest and mid-winter, not necessarily Martinmas (R.S.).A little detective work in the list of readers and compilers of unpublished glossaries, as cited at the front of Wright’s dictionary, tells us that J.N. was J. Nicholson of Hull and R.S. was, in all likelihood, R. Stead, living in Folkestone, but originating from East Yorkshire. The word is still in use. Walking round the Ulverston market only a few weeks ago, I heard an oldish man commenting to a friend: ‘Mi brother allus divides ’is perennials in’t spring, but Ah dis it in’t backend.’The word is so current, in fact, that the reader of Nicholson’s ‘The Elm Decline’ may fail to recognize ‘backend’ as being dialect usage, or, because the word is composed of two parts both completely familiar to the English-speaking reader, may not pause to think what the word actually means. And yet the late autumnal connotations, the dull scragginess, are deliberate and fit extremely well with Nicholson’s theme.

photo: Madson Scott-Clary

The title of the poem may, for the contemporary reader, call up images of the notorious Dutch elm disease which began to devastate the British elm population around 1967 and by 1990 had destroyed most of our mature elms. But the phrase ‘the elm decline’ has a much more specific denotation, current in archaeological, ecological and bio-geographical circles, which points to the near disappearance of the elm tree from the pollen record at two distinct points in pre-history, about 6,000 years and then again 3,000 years ago. Nicholson’s poem specifically mentions the decline of ‘Three / Thousand BC’, rounding off the stanza in which this nugget of information appears with the deliberately prosaic words:

The proportion of elm pollen preserved in peatdeclined from twenty per cent to four.​

The Danish scholar Jørgen Troels-Smith first proposed in the mid 1950s that this decline was attributable to the impact of Neolithic farmers on the landscape, in particular to their felling and pollarding practices. Nicholson’s poem is clearly influenced by this hypothesis, which he fuses with knowledge, also current at the time he composed it, of the existence of a stone age axe ‘factory’ centred on Great Langdale in the Lake District.

Blea Tarn. photo: Michael Graham, geograph.co.uk

The poem starts in our own present, somewhere in the Lake District, with a dramatic picture of crags crashing to the tarn – the tarn in question may well be Blea Tarn, now designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest precisely because of its importance for palaeo-environmental studies, which demonstrate the decline of the elm here as being correspondent with the dates of the Great Langdale Axe Factory. The crash of the crags is not only metaphorical – an image of steep-sided mountains seeming to descend with immense velocity into the waters beneath them – but also literal and symbolic. The crags literally crash into the tarn because they are now scree slopes – covered in loose fragments of eroded rock which slide down to the base or sometimes mantle the slopes entirely.

Symbolically the crags are crashing too because in the broader scope of time the mountains may disappear entirely. If we could see that process speeded up, then this could well seem like a form of crashing, although later in the poem Nicholson imagines the result as the ‘ground-down stumps / of a skeleton jaw’.

This process of erosion may happen of itself, without the intervention of human beings, but as with the decline of the elm in northern Europe in Neolithic times, human practices greatly speed up that process. Seven thousand years ago, the poem tells us, the tops of the now bare Lake District fells and mountains were like sea stacks and island skerries, spiking up above a green ocean-like ‘surge of oak, birch, elm’. This is where the word ‘backend’ appears, performing a double function. Nicholson imagines the tide of green ‘ebbing to ochre / and the wrackwood of backend’, first seeing, almost as in a modern nature documentary, the trees slowly change their colour from green to ochre, the browns of autumn looking like ‘wrackwood’, i.e. seaweed – wrack – floating on the tide. But the word ‘wrackwood’, invented by Nicholson, also has connotations of decay, of rubbish, and of wrecking, and signals the second function of ‘backend’: to herald the decay of the prehistoric natural flourishing which the second stanza describes.

In the third stanza, time shifts forward four thousand years to the period when the elm almost disappeared, while the fourth stanza gives us the reason for this disaster: the effect of human beings on their own habitation, when ‘Stone axes, / chipped clean from the crag-face, / ripped the hide off the fells’. Once the protective cover of the trees has gone, the earth erodes, and the flaking of the rock begins.

The poem then cuts to the present again, and describes further human exploitation of the land: ‘electric landslips crack the rock / drills tunnel it; / valleys go under the tap’ (i.e. valleys are flooded to make reservoirs to provide us with tap water).

The picture becomes bleaker still, with runnels created by dynamite channelling ‘poisoned rain’ and the ledges of the mountains being filed away by threatening ‘wind-to-wind rubbings of nuclear dust’.

At the end of the poem, Nicholson, seeing far into the future now, warns us that our manipulation of nature, intended to make a hostile environment into a human habitation, may well have catastrophic consequences:

under the scree,under the riddled rake,beside the outflow of the reedless lake,no human eye remains to seea landscape manhelped nature make.​Nicholson chose the word ‘backend’ with care to fit both the local setting of this poem and to make his ecological point, which is certainly not that humans shouldn’t interfere with nature – we too are part of the natural ecology and the earth provides us with what we need to make it into our ‘local habitation’. Yet, as the decline of the elm shows, although our shaping of nature to our needs can be beneficial, not only to ourselves but to the ecosystem, it can also have inadvertent and devastating consequences. The poisoning and fracturing of the earth by the forces now at our disposal – including, as Nicholson saw it, nuclear energy, may lead to the disappearance of all that sustains our lives. That would be the backend of all backends – a decline from which recovery might well be impossible.

Antoinette FawcettNovember 2015

AFTERNOTES

Current thinking on the Elm Decline is that both the impact of human beings on the environment and the disease carried by the elm bark beetle, now known as Dutch elm disease, played a part in its near disappearance from the pollen record. The abstract of a recent paper by Parker, Goudie et al. (2002), reviewing current interpretations of the event, concludes that the interplay between climate change, disease and human activities catalyzed this catastrophic decline.

Two brilliant Cumbrian women played a great part in the academic exploration and testing of the Elm Decline hypothesis and in the investigation of the Langdale Neolithic axe industry: Clare Fell (1912-2002), from Ulverston, and Winifred Pennington (1915-2007), from Barrow in Furness.

I love your article on 'backend'. it captures within its own scope the melancholy of the word you are writing about.

I have also been discussing it with a couple of archaeologist and historian friends. We wonder whether some of the confusion about exactly what 'backend' refers to may be attributed to the changes in calendars. When the year began in March, the back end of the year might have been as late as February/early March - still wintry weather. Now we have new year immediately after Christmas, perhaps we have displaced the back end of the year by a few weeks!